About — Minnow Park

For 39 years, I built a life on things I felt were certain and immovable: ideas about work, love, and faith.

In 2009, I was fresh out of college, working at an ad agency, when the financial crisis laid me off along with 85% of the company. I went all in with photography since then and haven’t looked back.

I grew up in a conservative reformed faith, and was deeply invested in serving at the church and the community there. I met someone at that church and we got married in 2014. And it was all working until it wasn’t.

In March 2020 at the start of the pandemic, my photography business disappeared. The following year, I was deep into questioning my faith and left the church I was at for close to a decade. Then a few years after my marriage ended, and I was left with nothing to hold or cover me.

I was left alone, in front of God, surrounded by the rubble of my life.

Did I do something wrong?
Am I being punished?
What do I do now?

Since then it’s been a journey of rebuilding my relationship to myself and God. People sometimes call seasons like that a gift. I don’t know if I can say fully for myself, but I do know that even though God didn’t spare me from anything, He sustained me through everything.

He held me closer than I was holding myself. And I was able to let go of my own machinations and allow my body and Spirit to be open with what was happening, that’s when the real return started to unfold.

I’m still on this journey, and by no means have I figured anything out. But my work now embodies what Henri Nouwen asks, “The main question is not ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’”

Get in touch

The influences

What if nothing is missing?

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”
Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“The glory of God is man fully alive.”
St. Irenaeus of Lyons

“God does not love us if we change; God loves us so that we can change.”
Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water

“The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed, to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is.”
Parker Palmer

“The question of calling is not primarily a question of what we might become, but a question of what is already true.”
Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh

Presence and attunement

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Augustine, Confessions

“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have.”
Howard Thurman, The Sound of the Genuine

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

What the mind alone can’t hold

“He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never.”
The Cloud of Unknowing

“What matters is not to think much, but to love much. So do whatever most kindles love in you.”
Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection

“It is our own resistance to experience, in the form of thinking and feeling, that closes us off from the ever-present background of our innate joy, just as clouds obscure the blue sky.”
Rupert Spira, You Are the Happiness You Seek

“The Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.”
Romans 8:26

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Closer than I was holding myself

“God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and presence of God.”
Meister Eckhart, The Nearness of the Kingdom

“Before God created us, He loved us, which love was never lacking and never shall be. In this love all our life is grounded, and in this love we are kept.”
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

“Let nothing trouble you, let nothing make you afraid. All things pass away. God never changes. Patience obtains everything. God alone is enough.”
Teresa of Avila

“The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament.”
Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

“I am a feather on the breath of God.”
Hildegard of Bingen

“To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island